@budnitz is likely one of the most-followed profiles on Ello (@ello wears the crown -- all users initially follow it). For Paul, we've got 7.1k views, and 175 loves, in 14 hours. Based on 297,938 followers.

That's a 3% "engagement" rate per view, which sounds low, but is actually really high by online standards. Paul's also netting about a 2% views rate from among his followers, again, that sounds low, but online, any traction is a challenge. Engagement activities per follower is lower: 0.08%. Believe it or not, that's still good compared with other sites.

Views Per Follower

The social relevance folks like to tout a metric, "VPF", or views per follower. For Ms. Blain, that number is 46.6.

That is, of her 4.7 million followers, across all her posts, she nets just 46 views per follower. Not per post, but for all posts, ever.

Think about that.

Google doesn't give us a per-user post count, unfortunately. But for all of her 2014 followers, the "active engagements" rate on the post highlighted above was 0.027%. Paul Budnitz's per-follower Ello engagement is 3x better.

Or, if I was in marketing: Ello has a 310% advantage in per-follower engagements compared to Brand G!

Now, some of the engagement math comes of necessity. The fewer followers you have, the higher your VPF statistic. Mine runs around 650, or 14x better than Ms. Blain, on G+, though with just north of 2,300 followers. It's simple reality: there are only so many posts a person can view per day, time is the ultimately limited resource, a there's going to be some rationing system in effect, whether it's intentional or incidental. Lower follower counts usually mean a greater personal relationship per follower.

On Ello, with 858 followers presently, I routinely see posting view counts at or above 50%, and not infrequently at several multiples of that. High-water mark to date has been my Estimating G+ User Activity post, which was linked in a few press reports, presently showing 13.7k views. With reshares inside and/or outside Ello, I've seen several posts hit 1-5k views.

Ballparking Ello actives by views of high-exposure accounts and posts

The @ello account is followed by all users, by default, though you can unfollow it. Still, views of @ello posts should give a pretty good sense of how many people are logged on to and viewing Ello over a given time period.

Looking at roughly month-old Ello posts, we see view counts in the 50-70k range,

That suggests something on the order of 6-10k daily users at least viewing posts, 50-60k monthly, and perhaps 170 - 200k current active Ello profiles.

Applying the 90/9/1 rule, perhaps 2 million total accounts created. That's a very rough number.

Ello Communities

We can get some more sense of scale from Ello's communities. These must be explicitly subscribed to, so are a fair indication of intentionality, and engaged users. Counts are all pretty modest, mostly three-figure followers, a few crack 1,000. These aren't thousands, these are followers, full count.

Ello Posting Activity ... n/a

I don't have a good sense of post counts, though sitemaps might provide that.

For now, views and followers data gives a sense of size and largely confirms my hunches to date.

And, for historical comparisons, this compares with Google+ releasing in July, 2011, with 10 million profiles. It had grown to 250m by the following year, and now sits at 2.5 billion, though the vast majority of those are likely registrations for other Google services, or Android devices. The actual G+ engagement per nominal user has always been rather on the low side.

Takeaways

Yes, Ello has a small social graph. But you knew that.

If you're on Ello to maximize your social reach, you're in the wrong place. If you're interested in seeing how this community develops, and helping, you're going to do better. But for now, it's not a numbers game.

I am seeing signs of growth generally -- my posts typically weren't breaking 100 views as of late last year, they're consistently above that and hitting four figures at times now.

I really like the features Ello offers. Embeds, images, and Markdown, especially. I would prefer that the site's style wasn't quite so stark, and have dressed it up a bit myself: distinguished headers, and some other odds and ends. And supporting proper blockquotes would be really nifty. Still, of the primary alternatives I've got available to me, if I want to post long-form content with graphics, headers, tables, bullets, and lists, it's about the best thing going (that's why I posted the G+ activity report here, and why I'm doing likewise for this one).

With a bumpy start (and vastly more interest than they'd anticipated), the Ello team have been deploying well-thought-out features at a really impressive clip. And I want to emphasize both sides of that: the rate of delivery is quite good, and they're not deploying misfeatures which have to be withdrawn later -- Google+ has been doing a lot of feature-culling of late. "Measure twice, cut once" applies very much in system design and architecture.

For all that though: features do not make a social network. Users do. And with a small social graph, finding other ways for those user to connect is crucial.

Mind: not getting the features right will hurt (and that's part of what went wrong with G+).

Here’s the problem. Beating Facebook at its own game is like punching a wall 1.35 billion bricks thick. The network effect of its critical mass means you can’t usurp it by being a little better. The only social apps to really succeed since its launch have tried to go around Facebook’s wall by being different.

Ello have demonstrated some genius. It created curated communities with virtually zero code investment, simply by declaring a distinct set of accounts, "Communities". Its use of unified reposts means that all users who comment on or re-share an Ello post are engaged in the same conversation. That concentrates and banks the social heat rather than splitting it, a good thing.

But what will help Ello is nailing the technicals and figuring out just how it can do "different".

The good news: If you want to reach the highest portion of the people who are actually following you, Ello's quite the good bet. Yes, total reach is small, but reach within that group is good.